The Real Thing, by Henry James

Chapter III.

It was for the elucidation of a mystery in one of these works that I first tried Mrs. Monarch. Her
husband came with her, to be useful if necessary — it was sufficiently clear that as a general thing he would prefer to
come with her. At first I wondered if this were for “propriety’s” sake — if he were going to be jealous and meddling.
The idea was too tiresome, and if it had been confirmed it would speedily have brought our acquaintance to a close. But
I soon saw there was nothing in it and that if he accompanied Mrs. Monarch it was (in addition to the chance of being
wanted), simply because he had nothing else to do. When she was away from him his occupation was gone — she never HAD
been away from him. I judged, rightly, that in their awkward situation their close union was their main comfort and
that this union had no weak spot. It was a real marriage, an encouragement to the hesitating, a nut for pessimists to
crack. Their address was humble (I remember afterwards thinking it had been the only thing about them that was really
professional), and I could fancy the lamentable lodgings in which the Major would have been left alone. He could bear
them with his wife — he couldn’t bear them without her.

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he couldn’t be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when
I was too absorbed in my work to talk. But I liked to make him talk — it made my work, when it didn’t interrupt it,
less sordid, less special. To listen to him was to combine the excitement of going out with the economy of staying at
home. There was only one hindrance: that I seemed not to know any of the people he and his wife had known. I think he
wondered extremely, during the term of our intercourse, whom the deuce I DID know. He hadn’t a stray sixpence of an
idea to fumble for; so we didn’t spin it very fine — we confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of liquor
(saddlers and breeches-makers and how to get good claret cheap), and matters like “good trains” and the habits of small
game. His lore on these last subjects was astonishing, he managed to interweave the station-master with the
ornithologist. When he couldn’t talk about greater things he could talk cheerfully about smaller, and since I couldn’t
accompany him into reminiscences of the fashionable world he could lower the conversation without a visible effort to
my level.

So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so easily have knocked one down. He looked after the
fire and had an opinion on the draught of the stove, without my asking him, and I could see that he thought many of my
arrangements not half clever enough. I remember telling him that if I were only rich I would offer him a salary to come
and teach me how to live. Sometimes he gave a random sigh, of which the essence was: “Give me even such a bare old
barrack as THIS, and I’d do something with it!” When I wanted to use him he came alone; which was an illustration of
the superior courage of women. His wife could bear her solitary second floor, and she was in general more discreet;
showing by various small reserves that she was alive to the propriety of keeping our relations markedly professional —
not letting them slide into sociability. She wished it to remain clear that she and the Major were employed, not
cultivated, and if she approved of me as a superior, who could be kept in his place, she never thought me quite good
enough for an equal.

She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind to it, and was capable of remaining for an hour almost as
motionless as if she were before a photographer’s lens. I could see she had been photographed often, but somehow the
very habit that made her good for that purpose unfitted her for mine. At first I was extremely pleased with her
lady-like air, and it was a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines, to see how good they were and how far they
could lead the pencil. But after a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I would with it my
drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression — she herself had
no sense of variety. You may say that this was my business, was only a question of placing her. I placed her in every
conceivable position, but she managed to obliterate their differences. She was always a lady certainly, and into the
bargain was always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing. There were moments when I was
oppressed by the serenity of her confidence that she WAS the real thing. All her dealings with me and all her husband’s
were an implication that this was lucky for ME. Meanwhile I found myself trying to invent types that approached her
own, instead of making her own transform itself — in the clever way that was not impossible, for instance, to poor Miss
Churm. Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would, she always, in my pictures, came out too tall — landing me
in the dilemma of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which, out of respect perhaps to my own
very much scantier inches, was far from my idea of such a personage.

The case was worse with the Major — nothing I could do would keep HIM down, so that he became useful only for the
representation of brawny giants. I adored variety and range, I cherished human accidents, the illustrative note; I
wanted to characterise closely, and the thing in the world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type. I had
quarrelled with some of my friends about it — I had parted company with them for maintaining that one HAD to be, and
that if the type was beautiful (witness Raphael and Leonardo), the servitude was only a gain. I was neither Leonardo
nor Raphael; I might only be a presumptuous young modern searcher, but I held that everything was to be sacrificed
sooner than character. When they averred that the haunting type in question could easily BE character, I retorted,
perhaps superficially: “Whose?” It couldn’t be everybody’s — it might end in being nobody’s.

After I had drawn Mrs. Monarch a dozen times I perceived more clearly than before that the value of such a model as
Miss Churm resided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course with the other fact that
what she did have was a curious and inexplicable talent for imitation. Her usual appearance was like a curtain which
she could draw up at request for a capital performance. This performance was simply suggestive; but it was a word to
the wise — it was vivid and pretty. Sometimes, even, I thought it, though she was plain herself, too insipidly pretty;
I made it a reproach to her that the figures drawn from her were monotonously (betement, as we used to say) graceful.
Nothing made her more angry: it was so much her pride to feel that she could sit for characters that had nothing in
common with each other. She would accuse me at such moments of taking away her “reputytion.”

It suffered a certain shrinkage, this queer quantity, from the repeated visits of my new friends. Miss Churm was
greatly in demand, never in want of employment, so I had no scruple in putting her off occasionally, to try them more
at my ease. It was certainly amusing at first to do the real thing — it was amusing to do Major Monarch’s trousers.
They WERE the real thing, even if he did come out colossal. It was amusing to do his wife’s back hair (it was so
mathematically neat,) and the particular “smart” tension of her tight stays. She lent herself especially to positions
in which the face was somewhat averted or blurred; she abounded in lady-like back views and profils perdus. When she
stood erect she took naturally one of the attitudes in which court-painters represent queens and princesses; so that I
found myself wondering whether, to draw out this accomplishment, I couldn’t get the editor of the Cheapside to publish
a really royal romance, “A Tale of Buckingham Palace.” Sometimes, however, the real thing and the make-believe came
into contact; by which I mean that Miss Churm, keeping an appointment or coming to make one on days when I had much
work in hand, encountered her invidious rivals. The encounter was not on their part, for they noticed her no more than
if she had been the housemaid; not from intentional loftiness, but simply because, as yet, professionally, they didn’t
know how to fraternise, as I could guess that they would have liked — or at least that the Major would. They couldn’t
talk about the omnibus — they always walked; and they didn’t know what else to try — she wasn’t interested in good
trains or cheap claret. Besides, they must have felt — in the air — that she was amused at them, secretly derisive of
their ever knowing how. She was not a person to conceal her scepticism if she had had a chance to show it. On the other
hand Mrs. Monarch didn’t think her tidy; for why else did she take pains to say to me (it was going out of the way, for
Mrs. Monarch), that she didn’t like dirty women?

One day when my young lady happened to be present with my other sitters (she even dropped in, when it was
convenient, for a chat), I asked her to be so good as to lend a hand in getting tea — a service with which she was
familiar and which was one of a class that, living as I did in a small way, with slender domestic resources, I often
appealed to my models to render. They liked to lay hands on my property, to break the sitting, and sometimes the china
— I made them feel Bohemian. The next time I saw Miss Churm after this incident she surprised me greatly by making a
scene about it — she accused me of having wished to humiliate her. She had not resented the outrage at the time, but
had seemed obliging and amused, enjoying the comedy of asking Mrs. Monarch, who sat vague and silent, whether she would
have cream and sugar, and putting an exaggerated simper into the question. She had tried intonations — as if she too
wished to pass for the real thing; till I was afraid my other visitors would take offence.

Oh, THEY were determined not to do this; and their touching patience was the measure of their great need. They would
sit by the hour, uncomplaining, till I was ready to use them; they would come back on the chance of being wanted and
would walk away cheerfully if they were not. I used to go to the door with them to see in what magnificent order they
retreated. I tried to find other employment for them — I introduced them to several artists. But they didn’t “take,”
for reasons I could appreciate, and I became conscious, rather anxiously, that after such disappointments they fell
back upon me with a heavier weight. They did me the honour to think that it was I who was most THEIR form. They were
not picturesque enough for the painters, and in those days there were not so many serious workers in black and white.
Besides, they had an eye to the great job I had mentioned to them — they had secretly set their hearts on supplying the
right essence for my pictorial vindication of our fine novelist. They knew that for this undertaking I should want no
costume-effects, none of the frippery of past ages — that it was a case in which everything would be contemporary and
satirical and, presumably, genteel. If I could work them into it their future would be assured, for the labour would of
course be long and the occupation steady.

One day Mrs. Monarch came without her husband — she explained his absence by his having had to go to the City. While
she sat there in her usual anxious stiffness there came, at the door, a knock which I immediately recognised as the
subdued appeal of a model out of work. It was followed by the entrance of a young man whom I easily perceived to be a
foreigner and who proved in fact an Italian acquainted with no English word but my name, which he uttered in a way that
made it seem to include all others. I had not then visited his country, nor was I proficient in his tongue; but as he
was not so meanly constituted — what Italian is? — as to depend only on that member for expression he conveyed to me,
in familiar but graceful mimicry, that he was in search of exactly the employment in which the lady before me was
engaged. I was not struck with him at first, and while I continued to draw I emitted rough sounds of discouragement and
dismissal. He stood his ground, however, not importunately, but with a dumb, dog-like fidelity in his eyes which
amounted to innocent impudence — the manner of a devoted servant (he might have been in the house for years), unjustly
suspected. Suddenly I saw that this very attitude and expression made a picture, whereupon I told him to sit down and
wait till I should be free. There was another picture in the way he obeyed me, and I observed as I worked that there
were others still in the way he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown back, about the high studio. He might have
been crossing himself in St. Peter’s. Before I finished I said to myself: “The fellow’s a bankrupt orange-monger, but
he’s a treasure.”

When Mrs. Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like a flash to open the door for her, standing there with the
rapt, pure gaze of the young Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice. As I never insisted, in such situations, on the
blankness of the British domestic, I reflected that he had the making of a servant (and I needed one, but couldn’t pay
him to be only that), as well as of a model; in short I made up my mind to adopt my bright adventurer if he would agree
to officiate in the double capacity. He jumped at my offer, and in the event my rashness (for I had known nothing about
him), was not brought home to me. He proved a sympathetic though a desultory ministrant, and had in a wonderful degree
the sentiment de la pose. It was uncultivated, instinctive; a part of the happy instinct which had guided him to my
door and helped him to spell out my name on the card nailed to it. He had had no other introduction to me than a guess,
from the shape of my high north window, seen outside, that my place was a studio and that as a studio it would contain
an artist. He had wandered to England in search of fortune, like other itinerants, and had embarked, with a partner and
a small green handcart, on the sale of penny ices. The ices had melted away and the partner had dissolved in their
train. My young man wore tight yellow trousers with reddish stripes and his name was Oronte. He was sallow but fair,
and when I put him into some old clothes of my own he looked like an Englishman. He was as good as Miss Churm, who
could look, when required, like an Italian.